JOHN TREVANION remained in the empty house. It had seemed that morning as if nothing could be more miserable: but it was more miserable now, when every cheerful element had gone out of it, and not even the distant sound of a child’s voice, or Rosalind’s dress, with its faint sweep of sound, was to be heard in the vacancy. After he had seen them off he walked home through the village with a very heavy heart. In front of the little inn there was an unusual stir: a number of rustic people gathered about the front of the house, surrounding two men of an aspect not at all rustical, who were evidently questioning the slow but eager rural witnesses. “It must ha’ been last night as he went,” said one. “I don’t know when he went,” said another, “but he never come in to his supper, I’ll take my oath o’ that.” They all looked somewhat eagerly towards John, who felt himself compelled to interfere, much as he disliked doing so. “What is the matter?” he asked, and then from half a dozen eager mouths the story rushed out. “A gentleman” had been living at the Red Lion for some time back. Nobody, it appeared, could make out what he wanted there; everybody (they now said) suspected him from the first. He would lie in bed all morning, and then get up towards afternoon. Nothing more was necessary to demonstrate his immorality, the guilt of the man. He went out trapesing in the woods at night, but he wasn’t no poacher, for he never seemed to handle a gun nor know aught about it. He would turn white when anybody came in and tried a trigger, or to see if the ball was drawn. No, he wasn’t no poacher: but he did always be in the woods o’ night, which meant no good, the rustics thought. There were whisperings aside, and glances, as this description was given, which were not lost upon John, but his attention was occupied in the first place by the strangers, who came forward and announced that they were detectives in search of an offender, a clerk in a merchant’s office, who had absconded, having squandered a considerable sum of his master’s money. “But this is an impossible sort of place for such a culprit to have taken refuge in,” John said, astounded. The chief of the two officers stepped out in front of the other, and asked if he might say a few words to the gentleman, then went on accompanying John, as he mechanically continued his way, repressing all appearance of the extraordinary commotion thus produced in his mind.
“You see, sir,” said the man, “it’s thought that the young fellow had what you may call a previous connection here.”
“Ah! was he perhaps related to some one in the village? I never heard his name.” (The name was Everard, and quite unknown to the neighborhood.)
“No, Mr. Trevanion,” said the other, significantly, “not in the village.”
“Where, then—what do you mean? What could the previous connection that brought him here be?”
The man took a pocket-book from his pocket, and produced a crumpled envelope. “You may have seen this writing before, sir,” he said.
John took it with a thrill of pain and alarm, recognizing the paper, the stamp of “Highcourt,” torn but decipherable on the seal, and feeling himself driven to one conclusion which he would fain have pushed from him; but when he had smoothed it out, with a hand which trembled in spite of himself, he suddenly cried out, with a start of overwhelming surprise and relief, “Why, it is my brother’s hand!”
“Your brother’s?” cried the officer, with a blank look. “You mean, sir, the gentleman that was buried yesterday?”
“My brother, Mr. Trevanion, of Highcourt. I do not know how he can have been connected with the person you seek. It must have been some accidental link. I have already told you I never heard the name.”
The man was as much confused and startled as John himself. “If that’s so,” he said, “you have put us off the track, and I don’t know now what to do. We had heard,” he added, with a sidelong look of vigilant observation, “that there was a lady in the case.”
“I know nothing about any lady,” said John Trevanion, briefly.
“There’s no trusting to village stories, sir. We were told that a lady had disappeared, and that it was more than probable—”
“As you say, village stories are entirely untrustworthy,” said John. “I can throw no light on the subject, except that the address on the envelope (Everard, is it?) is in my brother’s hand. He might, of course, have a hundred correspondents unknown to me, but I certainly never heard of this one. I suppose there is no more I can do for you, for I am anxious to get back to Highcourt. You have heard, no doubt, that the family is in deep mourning and sorrow.”
“I am very sorry, sir,” said the official, “and distressed to have interrupted you at such a moment, but it is our duty to leave no stone unturned.” Then he lingered for a moment. “I suppose, then,” he said, “there is no truth in the story about the lady—”
John turned upon him with a short laugh. “You don’t expect me, I hope, to answer for all the village stories about ladies,” he said, waving his hand as he went on. “I have told you all I know.”
He quickened his pace and his companion fell back. But the officer was not satisfied, and John Trevanion went on, with his mind in a dark and hopeless confusion, not knowing what extraordinary addition of perplexity was added to the question by this new piece of evidence, but feeling vaguely that it increased the darkness all around him. He had not in any way associated the stranger whom he had met on the road with his sister-in-law. He had thought it likely enough that the young man, perhaps of pretensions too humble to get admittance at Highcourt, had lingered about in foolish youthful adoration of Rosalind, which, however presumptuous it might be, was natural enough. To hear now that the young man who had presumed to do Miss Trevanion a service was a criminal in hiding made his blood boil. But his brother’s handwriting threw everything into confusion. How did this connect with the rest, what light did it throw upon the imbroglio, in what way could it be connected with the disappearance of Madam? All these things surged about him vaguely as he walked, but he could make nothing coherent, no rational whole out of them. The park and the trees lay in a heavy mist. The day was not cold, but stifling, with a low sky, and heavy vapors in the air, everything around wet, sodden, dreary. Never had the long stretches of turf and distant glades of trees seemed to him so lonely, so deserted and forsaken. There was not a movement to be seen, nobody coming by that public pathway which had been so great a grievance to the Trevanions for generations back. John, though he shared the family feeling in this respect, would have gladly now seen a village procession moving along the contested path. The house seemed to him to lie in a cold enclosure of mist and damp, abandoned by everybody, a spot on which there was a curse. But this, of course, was merely fanciful; and he shook off the feeling. There was pain enough involved in its recent history without the aid of imagination.
There was plenty to do, however. Mr. Trevanion’s papers had to be put in order, his personal affairs wound up; and it was almost better to have no interruption in this duty, and so get over it as quickly as possible. There is something dreadful under all circumstances in fulfilling this office. To examine into the innermost recesses in which a man has kept his treasures, his most intimate possessions, the records, perhaps, of his affections and ambitions; to open his desk, to pull out his drawers, to turn over the letters which, perhaps, to him were sacred, never to be revealed to any eye but his own, is an office from which it is natural to shrink. The investigator feels himself a spy, taking advantage of the pathetic helplessness of the dead, their powerlessness to protect themselves. John Trevanion sat down in the library with the sense of intrusion strong upon him, yet with a certain painful curiosity too. He was afraid of discovering something. At every new harmless paper which he opened he drew a long breath of relief. The papers of recent times were few—they were chiefly on the subject of money, the investments which had been made, appeals for funds sent to him for the needs of the estate, for repairs and improvements, which it was evident Mr. Trevanion had been slow to yield to. It seemed from the letters addressed to him that most of his business had been managed through his wife, which was a fact his brother was aware of; but somehow the constant reference to her, and the evident position assigned to her as in reality the active agency in the whole, added a curious and bewildering pang to the confusion in which all this had closed. It seemed beyond belief that this woman, who had stood by her husband so faithfully, his nurse, his adviser, his agent, his eyes and ears, should be now a sort of fugitive, under the dead man’s ban, separated from all she cared for in the world. John stopped in the middle of a bundle of letters to ask himself whether he had ever known a similar case. There was nothing like it in the law reports, nothing even in those causes célèbres which include so many wonders. A woman with everything in her hands, her husband’s business as well as his health, and the governance of her great household, suddenly turned away from it without reason given or any explanation—surely the man must have been mad—surely he must have been mad! It was the only solution that seemed possible. But then there arose before the thinker’s troubled vision those scenes which had preceded his brother’s death—the bramble upon her dress, the wet feet which she had avowed, with—was it a certain bravado? And again, that still more dreadful moment in the park, on the eve of her husband’s funeral, when he had himself seen her meet and talk with some one who was invisible in the shadow of the copse. He had seen it, there could be no question on the subject. What did it mean? He got up, feeling the moisture rise to his forehead in the conflict of his feelings; he could not sit still and go for the hundredth time over this question. What did it mean?
While he was walking up and down the library, unable to settle to any examination of those calm business papers in which no agitation was, a letter was brought to him. It bore the stamp of a post-town at a short distance, and he turned it over listlessly enough, until it occurred to him that the writing was that of his sister-in-law. Madam wrote as many women write; there was nothing remarkable about her hand. John Trevanion opened the letter with excitement. It was as follows:
“DEAR BROTHER JOHN,—You may not wish me to call you so now, but I have always felt towards you so, and it still seems a link to those I have left behind to have one relationship which I may claim. There seems no reason why I should not write to you, or why I should conceal from you where I am. You will not seek to bring me back; I am safe enough in your hands. I am going out of England, but if you want to communicate with me on any subject, the bankers will always know where I am. It is, as I said, an additional humiliation in my great distress that I must take the provision my husband has made, and cannot fling it back to you indignantly as a younger woman might. I am old enough to know, and bitterly acknowledge, that I cannot hope to maintain myself; and I have others dependent on me. This necessity will always make it easy enough to find me, but I do not fear that you will wish to seek me out or bring me back.
“I desire you to know that I understand my husband’s will better than any one else, and perhaps, knowing his nature, blame him less than you will be disposed to do. When he married me I was very forlorn and miserable. I had a story, which is the saddest thing that can be said of a woman. He was generous to me then in every particular but one, but that one was very important. I had to make a sacrifice, an unjustifiable sacrifice, and a promise which was unnatural. Herein lies my fault. I have not kept that promise; I could not; it was more than flesh and blood was capable of; and I deceived him. I was always aware that if he discovered it he might, and probably would, take summary vengeance. Now he has discovered it, and he has done without ruth what he promised me to do if I broke my word to him. I deserve it, you see, though not in the way the vulgar will suppose. To them I cannot explain, and circumstances, alas, make it impossible for me to be explicit even with you. But perhaps, even in writing so much, you may be delivered from some suspicions of me which, if I read you right, you will be glad to find are not justified.
“Farewell, dear John; if we ever should meet in this world—if I should ever be cleared— I cannot tell—most likely not—my children will grow up without knowing me; but I dare not think on that subject, much less say anything. God bless them! Be as much a father to them as you can, and let my Rosalind have the letter I enclose; it will do her no harm: anyhow, she would not believe harm of me, even though she saw what looked like harm. Pity me a little, John. I have taken my doom quietly because I have no hope—neither in what I leave nor in what I go to is there any hope.
GRACE TREVANION.”
This letter forced tears, such as a man is very slow to shed, to John Trevanion’s eyes; but there was in reality no explanation in it, no light upon the family catastrophe, or the confusion of misery and perplexity she had left behind.